Stephanie Vance

curriculum vitae

Research Interests

My general research interests lie at the intersection of discrete geometry, algebra, and combinatorics. I am currently working on problems involving lattice sphere packings in Hermitian complex and quaternionic vector spaces. Henry Cohn is my thesis advisor.

Teaching

I am currently supported by a research assistantship funded by Microsoft Research and so I am not teaching any courses at UW during the Autumn 2008 quarter. At TOPS Seward Elementary and Middle school I am beginning my third year as an instructor for a grade 3-6 math enrichment program which I have organized in the past.

For a list of the courses that I have taught over the past five years please see my curriculum vitae.

Recent Talks

• "An introduction to lattices and sphere packing problems", given May 22, 2008 at the UW Undergraduate Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences Seminar.
• "A Mordell inequality for Eisenstein and Hurwitz lattices", given March 28, 2008 at the Workshop on Extreme Geometric Structures, Hausdorff Institute, Bonn, Germany.
• "Lattices in real, complex and quaternionic vector spaces", given February 5, 2008 at SAGE Days 7 which was hosted by IPAM at UCLA.

Publications and Preprints

• A Mordell inequality for Eisenstein and Hurwitz lattices, to appear in Transactions of the AMS.
• New lower bounds for the sphere packing density in high dimension, (coming soon!)

Some Fun Links

• A Catalogue of Lattices, a lattice database maintained by Gabriele Nebe and Neil Sloane.
• Figure This!, fun and challenging mathematics problems for middle school students.